


running from us

by syari



Series: War Heroes [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Grief/Mourning, HP: EWE, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, not a ghost story, not tagging relationships because life is messy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 00:56:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13582614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syari/pseuds/syari
Summary: The first night back in Grimmauld Place, Harry sleeps like the dead. He sees them, too.--Or, the year after Voldemort's death goes about as well as you might expect.





	running from us

> _Give, unrestrained, the old emotion,_
> 
> _The bliss that touched the verge of pain,_
> 
> _The strength of Hate, Love's deep devotion,—_
> 
> _O, give me back my youth again!_
> 
> _—Goethe,_ Faust

 

The first night back in Grimmauld Place, Harry sleeps like the dead. He sees them, too.

The next morning, he does not wake screaming, nor the next, nor the next. War imbues many habits in its soldiers, and silence is an imperative. Ron and Hermione are already sitting at the old kitchen table when he goes down, eyes rimmed with red, violet circles below. He pours them all tea and traces his fingers over the scar in the wood where a chopping knife had once been.

They move in circles around one another, waiting with bated breath for—something, Harry supposes. The three of them know each other inside out, and he knows without asking that they are just as lost, just as adrift in the absence of the anchor of the certainty of violence. None of them expected to make it this far.

Of course, Hermione is the first to crack. She never could live without a plan, and Harry’s honestly surprised it took this long for one of them to snap. He still cries quietly when he sees the snips of curly hair in the bin, and again when his hair grows back overnight and hers doesn’t. When he sees her smile for the first time in weeks over a book Luna owls her, though, something falls back into place. He catches Ron’s eye over her head, exchanging weary looks that send a shock through his veins. Some things, at least, will never change.

Ginny writes him the next day. It is the first letter she has sent him since Fred’s funeral. In his mind’s eye, he sees her standing next to Ron, resplendent in black, eyes dry and blank. An hour later, he fishes the balled-up parchment out of the wastebasket and composes a short reply. He cannot be so cruel as to leave her unanswered after months of not knowing whether the other still lived any more than he can think about seeing her again. Her reply is sharp, and she speaks to him afterwards in thinly-veiled jabs through her letters to Ron, who only winces.

Harry thinks it is better this way, really. Maybe one day they will begin to heal, when he can look at her and not see his dead mum and a grief-stricken little sister in one, and she can look at him past the heroic tales of her youth and the dark eyes of a handsome boy with a dangerous smile. Maybe one day he can stop flinching when Kreacher drops something while cleaning the attic.

Ron sits in an armchair by the fire in the parlor, staring into the flames through the bottom of a glass of whiskey. Harry wonders if he sees fireworks tossed off brooms, or flashes of light passing over their heads, or a chimera made of fire and rage. Perhaps he sees nothing at all.

Hermione pours the last of the Firewhiskey down the sink, and it’s the first proper row Harry has seen between her and Ron since they stopped dancing around each other. By the end of it, they refuse to even speak until Harry firmly puts his foot down and locks them in a musty study to talk things out. Ron swears to stop drinking to forget, Hermione sends in her applications to university so she’ll stop breaking down over it, and Harry decides to erase from his mind the sight of their mussed hair and disarrayed clothing once they emerged.

Kingsley writes him just once. Harry tells the provisional Minister for Magic in no uncertain terms exactly where he can put his exemptions for Auror qualifications. He’s been up to his ears in preferential treatment and fighting for his life for years and is heartily sick of both. As he rocks Teddy to sleep at Andromeda’s, he thinks his father figures would have approved. Sirius, at least, had always been the largest proponent of sticking it to the man. He has to go sit for a while in a dark room after Teddy finally nods off to calm the pounding of his heart and the clamminess of his palms at the reminder of a mocking smile falling backwards and arms like bands of iron around his chest.

He emerges to sunlight and uncharacteristic heat and the glittering splendor that is Diagon Alley putting on its best face while still rebuilding. The spirit of hope is alive in the air and the faces of shopkeepers and schoolchildren alike, and Harry dares to let himself feel for a moment before he is mobbed by reporters and well-wishers and fame-seekers and people shaking his hand, touching his hair, chanting thanks. As he staggers on the front porch of Number Twelve, he recalls the jagged scar on Ron’s shoulder and sends up fervent thanks to anyone who might care to actually listen to him anymore that he didn’t Splinch off anything he really needed. He doesn’t return to Diagon without the Invisibility Cloak or glamours for a very long time.

Luna takes his hand under the Dirigible Plum bush and leads him up the stairs in a house that somehow looks even more architecturally unsound than when it was blown apart from the inside. Once they reach her room, she hands him a paintbrush and points him to a corner of her room she hasn’t gotten to yet. Under the watchful painted eyes of his closest friends, he doesn’t think. Later, Luna touches his unscarred hand gently to snap him out of his reverie and smiles at his wobbly picture of a skeletal winged horse. The next time he goes back, there is an entire forest in greens and grey in that corner, and two figures holding out their hands to the Thestral, one with an unruly black mane and the other with tangled blond curls.

He sees Neville, head bent over clasped hands, sitting on the old porch swing his father built for his mother. Even bowed over the crushing weight of his grandmother’s death a mere month after the Battle of Hogwarts, as they’re calling it in the papers still, Harry thinks Neville has more steel in his spine than any of the other survivors. Quietly, Neville confesses that he’s been considering taking Pomona Sprout’s offer of an apprenticeship in Herbology. Harry sits and wraps his arm around broad shoulders and tells Neville he’ll be brilliant. Neither of them mention the real and imagined ghosts he’ll have to pass every day to get to the greenhouses, or the way Neville squeezed the stem of the rose he held hard enough for blood to seep from between his palms.

Minerva McGonagall is old. Harry stares at her before remembering himself, shaken by this realization as she rounds the Headmistress’ Desk to embrace him. The tartan-wrapped witch bids him sit and offers him a biscuit and a job. Mind full of silver-white animals flowing around delighted schoolchildren and the grim look on those same children’s faces as they sent blasting curses at mechanical dummies, a refusal is on his tongue before it is halted by the lines by his former professor’s eyes as she tells him to take his time. Defense Against the Dark Arts will always be there for him, provided he takes his NEWTs.

Hermione throws herself fully into helping Harry prepare to sit for his exams. She needles him to return to Hogwarts for the eighth year being offered to students of the war, but he flat-out refuses. Maybe one day he’ll be ready to listen to McGonagall and return to Hogwarts, but given the panic attack (according to Hermione) he had once he left her office at the sight of a scorch mark on weathered stone, that time is a long way off. He takes his NEWTs in a cramped Ministry room with eight others who stare holes into the back of his head half the time, and counts himself lucky that he didn’t fail anything. He might not have the marks required for the Aurors, but he doesn’t need an O in Potions to sit in the grass by Luna as she tells him about the creatures in his head.

On one of his cloaked excursions to Diagon Alley, he stops off at Ollivander’s on a whim. The bell above the door tinkles as he enters, but the shop is otherwise silent and still. Heaving a sigh of relief, Harry tugs the Cloak off and turns to face a visibly startled Draco Malfoy. Harry can do nothing but stare, the old insults dragged down by memories of ash and smoke and exhaustion. After an eternity of silence in which they both manage not to kill each other, Harry extends a hand.

Over greasy chips from a Muggle pub just outside the Alley, Malfoy tells him about his apprenticeship under the old wandmaker, started from a simple apology without expectation of forgiveness. At first Harry wonders, but then he recalls the gaunt boy who repaired the magic in a broken Vanishing Cabinet amidst the brutal occupation of his ancestral home and the looming specter of an impossible task, and he is not surprised at all. Ollivander always did give the sense of looking right through you, and it’s not hard to imagine what he might have seen in a prideful young man willing to abase himself with no expectation of relief.

He does not stop seeing Malfoy, and eventually Malfoy becomes Draco. It does not stop the mob from seeing the Dark Mark on the other boy’s arm. When he receives the news of the “vigilante justice” done in broad daylight on Wizarding Britain’s busiest street, he does not emerge from his room for days until Hermione and Ron drag him out by force and listen to the whole story choked out between sobs. They all sleep together again that night, curled into one another on the couch for the only comfort they know. Hermione throws herself back into her Magical Law classes, and Ron takes time off from helping George at the joke shop to take Harry to see a Chudley Cannons match. They scream themselves hoarse for the losing team, and Harry does not cry when a slender blond man catches the snitch, his face alight with victory.

Harry writes a painful, stilted letter of condolence to Narcissa Malfoy. The response he gets is formal, but warmer than he thinks he deserves. The parchment smells faintly of lilies. He writes back. So does she.

He shows up on Luna’s doorstep in spring. The marigolds in the garden are blooming, and she steps out of the house holding a suitcase stuffed with notes and specimen jars, bottlecap necklace looped around her neck. She smiles and holds out her hand.

After a heartbeat and an eon, Harry takes it. Together they step into the unknown.

**Author's Note:**

> There was a lot more I wanted to say here, but it was impossible to include those things and stay true to the spirit of the original work. Sometimes you have to know when to move on.


End file.
